Boycott General Motors

Chinese Built Buick Envisions

Did you ever wonder what happened to all the TARP (Troubled Asset Restructuring Plan) money that President’s Bush and Obama handed out like an early lunch pass? Did you ever wonder where all the “Shovel Ready” jobs went that President Obama touted?

Obama was lying.

This was long before the most recent lie. Remember,

“If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor AND.. if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan.”

Obama and his cronies thought it was hilarious lying to the American People. Click Here

Turns out that it wasn’t only Obamacare that was a “Bill of Goods.”

This is what was reported on the CBS News site on October 13, 2010 – Click Here

With unemployment hovering near 10 percent nearly two years after President Obama signed his economic stimulus package, Mr. Obama is acknowledging that, despite his campaign promises, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”

Obamacare wasn’t the first waste of billions of dollars. The Troubled Asset Restructuring Plan was another unconscionable waste of time and money that President Obama inherited from his predecessor. Tragically, squandering billions of dollars benefiting politically connected crony capitalists was right down his alley.

TARP was a outrageously wasteful boondoggle that has reared it’s ugly head again. General Motors, one of the chief beneficiaries of the program, is now building vehicles in China for sale in the United States.

Disgraceful.

Bush and Obama are peas in a pod. They simply said what they needed to say to assure their constituencies are profitable enough to keep the multi-millions flowing in to their respective campaigns.

We know that BILLIONS were squandered across numerous preferred industries. This piece is about the auto industry, specifically, General Motors.

General Motors received more than $49.5 billion taxpayer dollars to keep the company afloat. If you believe Forbes, taxpayers lost $11 Billion. If CNN Money is your source, it only cost us $10 Billion. If you prefer Town Hall, the debacle cost us more than $16 Billion.

No cause for concern. It’s just taxpayer money. If they run out, they’ll print more. That’s what Bush’s Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke said.

Bernanke said

“The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at no cost..”

And away we go… savers be damned.. pricing be damned… wages be damned… values be damned… the public be damned… America be damned… Contributions from our crony capitalist buddies are paramount so, we must ignore, contort and destroy the US economy to assure that the people that give us money have all the money they need. How else will we maintain our positions?

If it costs real Americans the American Dream, let them eat cake.

This is all old news. I’m writing this article because of the new news about General Motors. The TARP money you and I lavished on GM at the behest of the Bushes, the Bernanke’s and the Obama’s was to “SAVE” the US auto industry and the jobs pertaining thereto.

A brief aside. There’s an economic truth called “Creative Destruction.” It was presented by an Austrian economist named Joseph Schumpeter. Schumpeter correctly concluded that capitalism creates local chaos. In the case of General Motors, the chaos was created by bad management and union intransigence that led to the production of poor products that tanked sales.

Permitted to run its course, the current owners would have lost their positions, new non-taxpayer money would have been invested and a new team would have appeared that would have operated within realistic constraints permitting the company to persist and prosper.

The same thing happens at a sandwich shop that makes bad sandwiches. The difference is the sandwich shop owner doesn’t make significant political contributions. As their is no financial benefit to whichever administration is in power, the sandwich shop is permitted to fail. They can please neither the market nor the party in power so they stop making sandwiches that no one wants.

This is how it should be.

You know what happened to people who work for a sandwich shop that goes out of business? They find other jobs.

Do you know what would have happened to the people working for GM? They would have found other jobs OR, they would have worked for the new owners of the same FORMER GM factory that they were employed by. Since this factory is used to manufacture vehicles, it makes sense that another auto company would have purchased the facility. As they’re skilled manufacturing labor, it makes sense that the new owners would hire most of the employees to make their brand of vehicle.

Nothing happens to the factory. It doesn’t slip into a sink hole. It remains. Only now, it’s sold for a fire sale price by GM because they’ve lost their way. As General Motors is no longer capable of operating a car company they sell their assets to someone who is. Then, someone else, perhaps another car company would buy the facility and restart production and do things correctly. The new owner would have resumed manufacturing without $50 Billion Dollars of our money.

But we didn’t do that. Bernanke, Bush and Obama gave GM Billions of Dollars that we’ll never see again. What did General Motors do? Did they rebuild Buick City in Flint, Michigan? No. They’re building Buicks in China and shipping them back here. That’s what General Motors did with your billions.

That’s bad enough, but in the process of flushing our cash, Obama dictated which vehicles would be produced and which ones would not. Forget about the market. Forget about consumer preferences. Forget about freedom of choice. Forget about freedom of association. Forget about capitalism, unless it’s “Crony Capitalism.”

General Motors was once headed by men that ran the US manufacturing capacity that was largely responsible for our triumph in two World Wars.

Not anymore.

Now they’re children coming hat in hand for instructions on what they might and might not manufacture. Tragically, inexplicably, and stupidly, they closed the Pontiac Division when commanded to do so by Barack Obama. The 1967 Pontiac Firebird was the first vehicle I ever owned. I was contemplating purchasing a new one when the company acceded to this ridiculous order.

General Motors Management had no choice but to agree to the President’s terms. They had run their company into the ground and were eagerly awaiting billions and billions and billions of taxpayer dollars.

POOF! Pontiac was gone.

Tell me they couldn’t have sold a zillion of these bad boys and twice as many of their successor.

But NOOOOOO…… General Motors took government money, paid a fraction of it back, left their employees high and dry and moved their operations to China at our expense. Flint, Michigan, the former Buick City, has been devastated. Thanks to their tax base fleeing to China, the no longer have clean water. Click Here

Why would any American buy a car from General Motors?

So, I presently own an awesome Hyundai. It’s the ultra-elegant 2005 Tucson. It’s the car General Motors wishes they knew how to build. My friends and I call it…. The Marauder. 🙂

And.. guess where the Tucson is built. That’s right.. it’s 100% American Made… right here in the good old USA. This from the Hyundai web site:

Making an impact in America.

Hyundai may be a Korean company, but over half the cars we sell in the U.S. are made here. We have a technologically sophisticated manufacturing facility in Montgomery, Alabama, engineering facilities in Michigan, plus design, research, and testing grounds in California. We’ve created a lot of things we’re proud of at these facilities but chief among them is jobs. In 2011, we contributed over 94,000 of them all across America. Reborn in the USA.

And.. here’s the obligatory happy US employee video:

MAAAAANNNNN… do those guys know how to make GREAT AMERICAN CARS or what? Best of all, they’re building them in America. 🙂

This is why we need Donald Trump as President. The lunacy, the idiocy, the hypocrisy, the insanity, the folly of providing political donors with tens of billions of dollars for no other reason than to keep the tens of millions of dollars flowing towards political campaign coffers while literally destroying the incentive to accumulate capital and simultaneously precipitating the de-industrialization of the United States is tantamount to treason.